From help-request at octave dot org Tue Jan 25 14:03:11 2005
Subject: Re: octave -> gnuplot -> latex in labels HOWTO ?
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel at sbcglobal dot net>
Cc: octave help mailing list <help at octave dot org>
Date: Tue, 25 Jan 2005 15:06:28 -0500

This is somewhat off topic now, but...

On 25-Jan-2005, Jonathan Stickel <jjstickel at sbcglobal dot net> wrote:

| It's mostly a matter of preference and mode of operation.

Fair enough, and the two methods are almost the same anyway.  It would
not be too hard to write a epslatex2ps (or epslatex2pdf) script to do
essentially the same thing as fig2ps, if you would prefer to have a
single scalable file for each figure, instead of having the TeX and
EPS parts kept separate.

| I like to 
| have standalone pdf (or eps) figure files that I can view in final form 
| without latexing an entire document.

OK, but what if you change your overall document font?  Then the font
in your standalone figures will no longer match.  Granted, this is
not a big problem if you have a nice Makefile that does all the figure
conversion for you (you might want that for epslatex figures too -- I
tend to use Octave to write out data files, then have separate gnuplot
files to generate the plots with Make managing all the dependencies).

| There is also the matter of 
| preferred latex syntax:  \includegraphics vs. \input, and how to scale 
| the included figure.

If you have an epslatex figure, \scalebox{...}{\input{foo}} works.
The \scalebox macro is part of the graphicx package, which is needed
anyway by the epslatex figures, since the TeX part of the figure uses
\includegraphics to insert the EPS (or PDF) part.

| Perhaps most tangible, there is the ability to 
| mark up the plots in xfig when using the fig output from gnuplot.

This is a good reason, at least for those figures that need additional
editing.  But I also find that I don't want to have to do much
tweaking by hand.  Repetitive pointing and clicking makes my head
numb.

jwe



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